Decentralisation is a core tenet of something like Bitcoin. That's why crypto nuts always check how decentralised the holdings of a given currency are.Crypto decentralisation is easily trackable through the block chain. Hashing difficulty is also publicly known.

Bitcoin is trusted because it is highly distributed and it would be extremely expensive to launch a 51% attack on it.

The verge is a well known shitcoin it's been hacked multiple times already.

There are many newer platforms that are moving away from PoW to PoS and DPoS. They all exhibit various degrees of resistance to hacking but still depend on good distribution of the coins themselves.

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail was hacked on Sunday, losing about 30 percent of the coins traded there.

The site has temporarily suspended trading as it works with investigators.

A statement on the exchange's site sought to reassure users -- saying that the remainder of the coins were "safely stored" -- but Reuters reports that the value of Bitcoin tumbled to two-month lows in the hack's aftermath.

It notes that Bitcoin was trading at $6,790.88 on Bitstamp, a drop of 10.8 percent from Friday and a massive dip from its December 2017 peak, when it hit an all-time high of almost $20,000.

Two sites that are actively cataloging failed crypto projects, Coinopsy and DeadCoins, have found that over a 1,000 projects have failed so far in 2018. The projects range from true abandonware to outright scams, and include BRIG, a scam by two “brothers,” Jack and Jay Brig, and Titanium, a project that ended in an SEC investigation.

You can create a new cryptocurrency just like an app or a program in a couple of hours. Those stats dont mean a whole lot. Whats more informative is BTC dominance is now very high at almost 50% which is bad for alternative coin valuations, even the 'good' ones with strong communities, use cases and developer bases. Bitcoin is just stomping all over everything just now.Money is flowing into BTC as BTC ETF approval is expected in August.

That being said if you want to buy into some alts its possibly a good opportunity. Or not.

A lot fewer people than you probably would have guessed. After peaking at $411 million in September, the amount of money the largest 17 crypto merchant-processing services received in the best-known cryptocurrency has been on a steady decline, hitting a recent low of $60 million in May, according to research that startup Chainalysis Inc. conducted for Bloomberg News.

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“It’s not actually usable," Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, said in an email. Often, he said, "the net cost of a Bitcoin transaction is far more than a credit card transaction." And Bitcoin-based transactions can’t be reversed, an issue when a merchant or a consumer comes up against fraud.

_________________"Abortion is the only event that modern liberals think too violent and obscene to portray on TV. This is not because they are squeamish or prudish. It is because if people knew what Abortion really looked like, it would destroy their pretence that it is a civilized answer to the problem of what to do about unwanted babies." ~ Peter Hitchen

Electricity is 90 percent of the cost to mine bitcoin. As such, bitcoin mining uses an exorbitant amount of power: somewhere between an estimated 30 terawatt hours alone in 2017 alone. That’s as much electricity as it takes to power the entire nation of Ireland in one year.

Indeed, this is a lot, but not exorbitant. Banking consumes an estimated 100 terawatts of power annually. If bitcoin technology were to mature by more than 100 times its current market size, it would still equal only 2 percent of all energy consumption.

Electricity is 90 percent of the cost to mine bitcoin. As such, bitcoin mining uses an exorbitant amount of power: somewhere between an estimated 30 terawatt hours alone in 2017 alone. That’s as much electricity as it takes to power the entire nation of Ireland in one year.

Indeed, this is a lot, but not exorbitant. Banking consumes an estimated 100 terawatts of power annually. If bitcoin technology were to mature by more than 100 times its current market size, it would still equal only 2 percent of all energy consumption.

And the amount of Bitcoin mined halves ever four years (next halvening is 2020) so this'll also reduce energy consumption. Far too much is made of the energy consumption of BTC.

In Bitcoin mining, price follows hash power and vice-versa like chicken and egg. The halvening will effectively halve the mining reward per block. In the past these events haven't had much significance on the dollar value of the overall reward per block. However, because fewer coins are rewarded post halvening, the dollar price per Bitcoin effectively doubles (not immediately, in reality the dollar price rises over the prior months in anticipation of the halvening event).

So in all, the longer that Bitcoin survives, one would expect hash power to increase exponentially. However, I agree that the electricity usage problem is hugely overblown and is used by Bitcoin sceptics as another excuse to bash the technology through misinformation. In reality, as Bitcoin gets harder to mine because global collective hash power is surging, mining ops are increasingly migrating to renewable sources. e.g. hydroelectric in Canada and geothermal in Iceland (one of world's largest mining facilities is there already). This is market forces at work, driving the requirement for more energy efficient mining, just as you would expect over the long-run.

Last October, Giga Watt was on a scorching upward trajectory. With prices for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies soaring and international investors clamoring for a piece of the digital action, the East Wenatchee-based company had expanded to 62 employees and raised tens of millions of dollars for what it hoped would be a game-changing project: a sprawling campus of 24 prefabricated buildings where would-be crypto “miners” could run their own computers and solve the complicated mathematical algorithms that yield the digital gold.

As the pods arose from a muddy site near the Douglas County airport, local government officials talked excitedly about the emergence of a new, 21st-century industry based on the complex “blockchain” technologies that enable bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. Giga Watt and its founder, a former Seattle-area programmer named Dave Carlson, saw themselves on that revolution’s cutting edge.

Now it’s a starkly different picture. Last month, beset by millions of dollars in debt, ongoing legal problems and questions about its unconventional financing, Giga Watt laid off 80 percent of its staff and suspended all construction. Carlson himself stepped down in August.

The large amounts of electricity used by computer servers for cryptocurrency “mining” pose a growing challenge for utilities such as Chelan Public Utility District, to which such operations are drawn by the cheap rates for power. This unauthorized set-up in Cashmere was discovered in 2015.Related storiesBitcoin backlash as ‘miners’ suck up electricity, stress power grids in Central Washington (May 2018)

The moves come as the volatile sector, which ignited a small gold rush in the mid-Columbia Basin, is struggling with softening cryptocurrency prices and uncertain costs for its prime “raw material,” cheap electricity. The market correction has wiped out many small players and forced even some larger players to rewrite their plans.

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Since 2012, the cost of power to mine a single bitcoin has climbed from around $2 to more than $2,000, Turner said. But because bitcoin prices were rising even faster, miners were more than willing to pay those power bills. By late 2017, that enthusiasm had transformed the mid-Columbia Basin into a digital boomtown. Would-be miners from as far away as China flooded the three public-power utilities with requests for staggeringly large amounts of electricity.

In Grant County alone, miners requested approximately 1,500 megawatts of power — or nearly three times as much as the county’s residents and businesses were using, said Grant County PUD spokesman Ryan Holterhoff. Chelan and Douglas counties have also seen a surge in demand from prospective miners. A megawatt is enough to power around 600 homes. At Giga Watt, Carlson’s pod project was slated to use 30 megawatts.

The cost to earn $1 of digital gold is much more expensive than $1 of physical gold

The amount of energy required to mine bitcoin, or digital gold as some proponents like to call it, is considerably higher than that of physical gold, a research study has found.

In a research paper for The Nature International Journal of Science, Max Krause, a research engineer at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, and Thabet Tolaymat of the Environmental Protection Agency found that the cost to mine $1 worth of bitcoin is more than three times the cost to mine $1 of gold and other precious metals.

Between Jan. 1, 2016, and June 30, 2018, they found that it costs an average 17 megajoules to mine $1 worth of bitcoin and between seven and fourteen other popular cryptocurrencies, including Ether, and Monero.

_________________"Abortion is the only event that modern liberals think too violent and obscene to portray on TV. This is not because they are squeamish or prudish. It is because if people knew what Abortion really looked like, it would destroy their pretence that it is a civilized answer to the problem of what to do about unwanted babies." ~ Peter Hitchen

Teachers at the school in Hunan became suspicious of a whirring noise that continued day and night, local media report.

This led to the discovery of the machines, which were mining the crypto-currency Ethereum.

They racked up an electricity bill of 14,700 yuan (£1,600).

The excessive electricity consumption had previously been reported to the headmaster, Lei Hua, but he reportedly dismissed it as being caused by air conditioners and heating devices.

Is there actually a profit in "mining", or are you just wasting energy?

_________________"Democracy is like sausage, you want it, but you don't want to know how it is made". [John Godfrey Saxe]Ronald Coase, Nobel Economic Sciences, said in 1991 “If we torture the data long enough, it will confess.”"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws" — Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild"To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated": Elon Musk